How to Identify and Tackle Keyword Cannibalisation in 2019

Posted by SamuelMangialavori

If you read the title of this blog and somehow, even only for a second, thought about the iconic movie “The Silence of the Lambs”, welcome to the club — you are not alone!

Despite the fact that the term “cannibalisation” does not sound very suitable for digital marketing, this core concept has been around for a long time. This term simply identifies the issue of having multiple pages competing for the same (or very similar) keywords/keyword clusters, hence the cannibalisation.

What do we mean by cannibalisation in SEO?

This unfortunate and often unnoticed problem harms the SEO potential of the pages involved. When more than one page has the same/similar keyword target, it creates “confusion” in the eyes of the search engine, resulting in a struggle to decide what page to rank for what term.

For instance, say my imaginary e-commerce website sells shoes online and I have created a dedicated category page that targets the term ‘ankle boots’: www.distilledshoes.com/boots/ankle-boots/

Knowing the importance of editorial content, over time I decide to create two blog posts that cover topics related to ankle boots off the back of a keyword research: one post on how to wear ankle boots and another about the top 10 ways to wear ankle boots in 2019:

One month later, I realise that some of my blog pages are actually ranking for a few key terms that my e-commerce category page was initially visible for.

Now the question is: is this good or bad for my website?

Drum roll, please...and the answer is — It depends on the situation, the exact keywords, and the intent of the user when searching for a particular term.

Keyword cannibalisation is not black or white — there are multiple grey areas and we will try and go though several scenarios in this blog post. I recommend you spend 5 minutes checking this awesome Whiteboard Friday which covers the topic of search intent extremely well.

How serious of a problem is keyword cannibalisation?

Much more than what you might think — almost every website that I have worked on in the past few years have some degree of cannibalisation that needs resolving. It is hard to estimate how much a single page might be held back by this issue, as it involves a group of pages whose potential is being limited. So, my suggestion is to treat this issue by analysing clusters of pages that have some degree of cannibalisation rather than single pages.

Where is most common to find cannibalisation problems in SEO?

Normally, you can come across two main placements for cannibalisation:

1) At meta data level:

When two or more pages have meta data (title tags and headings mainly) which target the same or very similar keywords, cannibalisation occurs. This requires a less labour-intensive type of fix, as only meta data needs adjusting.

For example: my e-commerce site has three boots-related pages, which have the following meta data:

Page URL	Title tag	Header 1
/boots/all	/Women’s Boots - Ankle & Chelsea Boots | Distilled Shoes	Women’s Ankle & Chelsea Boots
/boots/ankle-boots/	Women’s Ankle Boots | Distilled Shoes	Ankle Boots
boots/chelsea-boots/	Women’s Chelsea Boots | Distilled Shoes	Chelsea Boots

These types of keyword cannibalisation often occurs on e-commerce sites which have many category (or subcategory) pages with the intention to target specific keywords, such as the example above. Ideally, we would want to have a generic boots page to target generic boots related terms, while the other two pages should be focusing on the specific types of boots we are selling on those pages: ankle and chelsea.

Why not try the below instead?

Page URL	New Title Tag	New Header 1
/boots/all	Women’s Boots - All Types of Winter Boots | Distilled Shoes	Women’s Winter Boots
/boots/ankle-boots/	Women’s Ankle Boots | Distilled Shoes	Ankle Boots
boots/chelsea-boots/	Women’s Chelsea Boots | Distilled Shoes	Chelsea Boots

More often than not, we fail to differentiate our e-commerce site’s meta data to target the very specific subgroup of keywords that we should aim for — after all, this is the main point of having so many category pages, no? If interested in the topic, find here a blog post I wrote on the subject.

The fact that e-commerce pages tend to have very little text on them makes meta data very important, as it will be one of the main elements search engines look at to understand how a page differs from the other.

2) At page content level

When cannibalisation occurs at page content level (meaning two or more pages tend to cover very similar topics in their body content), it normally needs more work than the above example, since it requires the webmaster to first find all the competing pages and then decide on the best approach to tackle the issue.

For example: say my e-commerce has two blog pages which cover the following topics:

Page URL	Objective of the article
/blog/how-to-clean-leather-boots/	Suggests how to take care of leather boots so they last longer
/blog/boots-cleaning-guide-2019/	Shows a 121 guide on how to clean different types of boots

These types of keyword cannibalisation typically occurs on editorial pages, or transactional pages provided with substantial amount of text.

It is fundamental to clarify something: SEO is often not the main driver when producing editorial content, as different teams are involved in producing content for social and engagement reasons, and fairly so. Especially in larger corporations, it is easy to underestimate how complex it is to find a balance between all departments and how easily things can be missed.

From a pure SEO standpoint, I can assure you that the two pages above are very likely to be subject to cannibalisation. Despite the fact they have different editorial angles, they will probably display some degree of duplicated content between them (more on this later).

In the eyes of a search engine, how different are these two blog posts, both of which aim to address a fairly similar intent? That is the main question you should ask yourself when going through this task. My suggestion is the following: Before investing time and resources into creating new pages, make the effort to review your existing content.

What are the types of cannibalisation in SEO?

Simply put, you could come across 2 main types:

1) Two or more landing pages on your website that are competing for the same keywords

For instance, it could be the case that, for the keyword "ankle boots", two of my pages are ranking at the same time:

Page URL	Title tag	Ranking for the keyword “ankle boots”
Page A: /boots/all	Women’s Boots - Ankle & Chelsea Boots | Distilled Shoes	Position 8
Pabe B: /boots/ankle-boots/	Women’s Ankle Boots | Distilled Shoes	Position 5

Is this a real cannibalisation issue? The answer is both yes and no.

If multiple pages are ranking for the same term, it is because a search engine finds elements of both pages that they think respond to the query in some way — so technically speaking, they are potential ‘cannibals’.

Does it mean you need to panic and change everything on both pages? Surely not. It very much depends on the scenario and your objective.

Scenario 1

In the instances where both pages have really high rankings on the first page of the SERPS, this could work in your advantage: More space occupied means more traffic for your pages, so treat it as "good" cannibalisation.

If this is the case, I recommend you do the following:

• Consider changing the meta descriptions to make them more enticing and unique from each other. You do not want both pages to show the same message and fail to impress the user.
• In case you realise that amongst the two pages, the “secondary/non-intended page” is ranking higher (for example: Page A /boots/all ranks higher than Page B /boots/ankle-boots/ for the term ‘ankle boots’), you should check on Google Search Console (GSC) to see which page is getting the most amount of clicks for that single term. Then, decide if it is worth altering other elements of your SEO to better address that particular keyword.

For instance, what would happen if I removed the term ankle boots from my /boots/all (Page A) title tag and page copy? If Google reacts by favouring my /boots/ankle-boots/ page instead (Page B), which may gain higher positions, then great! If not, the worst case scenario is you can revert the changes back and keep enjoying the two results on page one of the SERP.

Page URL	Title tag	Ranking for the keyword “ankle boots”
Page A: /boots/all	Women’s Boots - Chelsea Boots & many more types | Distilled Shoes	Test and decide

Scenario 2

In the instances where page A has high rankings page one of the SERPS and page B is nowhere to be seen (beyond the top 15–20 results), it is up to you to decide if this minor cannibalisation is worth your time and resources, as this may not be an urgency.

If you decide that it is worth pursuing, I recommend you do the following:

• Keep monitoring the keywords for which the two pages seem to show, in case Google might react differently in the future.
• Come back to this minor cannibalisation point after you have addressed your most important issues.

Scenario 3

In the instances where both pages are ranking in page two or three of the SERP, then it might be the case that your cannibalisation is holding one or both of them back.

If this is the case, I recommend you do the following:

• Check on GSC to see which of your pages is getting the most amount of clicks for that single keyword. You should also check on similar terms, since keywords on page two or three of the SERP will show very low clicks in GSC. Then, decide which page should be your primary focus — the one that is better suited from a content perspective — and be open to test changes for on-page SEO elements of both pages.
• Review your title tags, headings, and page copies and try to find instances where both pages seem to overlap. If the degree of duplication between them is really high, it might be worth consolidating/canonicalising/redirecting one to the other (I'll touch on this below).

2) Two or more landing pages on your website that are flip-flopping for the same keyword

It could be the case that, for instance, the keyword “ankle boots” for two of my pages are ranking at different times, as Google seems to have a difficult time deciding which page to choose for the term.

Page URL	Ranking for the keyword “ankle boots” on 1st of January	Ranking for the keyword “ankle boots” on 5th of January
Page A: /boots/all	Position 6	Not ranking
Pabe B: /boots/ankle-boots/	Not ranking	Position 8

If this happens to you, try and find an answer to the following questions:This is a common issue that I am sure many of you have encountered, in which landing pages seem to be very volatile and rank for a group of keywords in a non-consistent manner.

When did this flip-flopping start?

Pinpointing the right moment in time where this all began might help you understand how the problem originated in the first place. Maybe a canonical tag occurred or went missing, maybe some changes to your on-page elements or an algorithm update mixed things up?

How many pages flip-flop between each other for the same keyword?

The fewer pages subject to volatility, the better and easier to address. Try to identify which pages are involved and inspect all elements that might have triggered this instability.

How often do these pages flip-flop?

Try and find out how often the ranking page for a keyword has changed: the fewer times, the better. Cross reference the time of the changes with your knowledge of the site in case it might have been caused by other adjustments.

If the flip-flop has occurred only once and seems to have stopped, there is probably nothing to worry about, as it's likely a one-off volatility in the SERP. At the end of the day, we need to remember that Google runs test and changes almost everyday.

How to identify which pages are victims of cannibalisation

I will explain what tools I normally use to detect major cannibalisation fluxes, but I am sure there are several ways to reach the same results — if you want to share your tips, please do comment below!

Tools to deploy for type 1 of cannibalisation: When two of more landing pages are competing for the same keyword

I know we all love tools that help you speed up long tasks, and one of my favourites is Ahrefs. I recommend using their fantastic method which will find your ‘cannibals’ in minutes.

Watch their five minute video here to see how to do it.

I am certain SEMrush, SEOMonitor, and other similar tools offer the same ability to retrieve that kind of data, maybe just not as fast as Ahrefs’ method listed above. If you do not have any tools at your disposal, Google Search Console and Google Sheets will be your friends, but it will be more of a manual process.

Tools to deploy for Type 2 of cannibalisation: When two or more landing pages are flip-flopping for the same keyword

Ideally, most rank tracking tools will be able to do this functionally discover when a keyword has changed ranking URL over time. Back in the day I used tracking tools like Linkdex and Pi Datametrics to do just this.

At Distilled, we use STAT, which displays this data under History, within the main Keyword tab — see screenshot below as example.

One caveat of these kinds of ranking tools is that this data is often accessible only by keyword and will require data analysis. This means it may take a bit of time to check all keywords involved in this cannibalisation, but the insights you'll glean are well worth the effort.

Google Data Studio Dashboard

If you're looking for a speedier approach, you can build a Google Data Studio dashboard that connects to your GSC to provide data in real time, so you don’t have to check on your reports when you think there is a cannibalisation issue (credit to my colleague Dom).

Our example of a dashboard comprises two tables (see screenshots below):

The table above captures the full list of keyword offenders for the period of time selected. For instance, keyword 'X' at the top of the table has generated 13 organic clicks (total_clicks) from GSC over the period considered and changed ranking URL approximately 24 times (num_of_pages).

The second table (shown above) indicates the individual pages that have ranked for each keyword for the period of time selected. In this particular example, for our keyword X (which, as we know, has changed URLs 24 times in the period of time selected) the column path would show the list of individual URLs that have been flip flopping.

What solutions should I implement to tackle cannibalisation?

It is important to distinguish the different types of cannibalisation you may encounter and try to be flexible with solutions — not every fix will be the same.

I started touching on possible solutions when I was talking about the different types of cannibalisation, but let’s take a more holistic approach and explain what solutions are available.

301 redirection

Ask yourself this question: do I really need all the pages that I found cannibalising each other?

In several instances the answer is no, and if that is the case, 301 redirects are your friends.

For instance, you might have created a new (or very similar) version of the same article your site posted years ago, so you may consider redirecting one of them — generally speaking, the older URL might have more equity in the eyes of search engines and potentially would have attracted some backlinks over time.

Page URL	Date of blog post
Page A: blog/how-to-wear-ankle-boots	May 2016
Page B: blog/how-to-wear-ankle-boots-in-2019	December 2018

Check if page A has backlinks and, if so, how many keywords it is ranking for (and how well it is ranking for those keywords)What to do:

• If page A has enough equity and visibility, do a 301 redirect from page B to page A, change all internal links (coming from the site to page B) to page A, and update metadata of page A if necessary (including the reference of 2019 for instance)
• If not, do the opposite: complete a 301 redirect from page A to page B and change all internal links (coming from the site to page A) to page B.

Canonicalisation

In case you do need all the pages that are cannibalising for whatever reason (maybe PPC, social, or testing purposes, or maybe it is just because they are still relevant) then canonical tags are your friends. The main difference with a 301 redirect is that both pages will still exist, while the equity from page A will be transferred to page B.

Let's say you created a new article that covers a similar topic to another existing one (but has a different angle) and you find out that both pages are cannibalising each other. After a quick analysis, you may decide you want Page B to be your "primary", so you can use a canonical tag from page A pointing to page B. You would want to use canonicalisation if the content of the two pages is diverse enough that users should see it but not so much that search engines should think it's different.

Page URL	Date of blog post
Page A: blog/how-to-wear-ankle-boots-with-skinny-jeans	December 2017
Page B: blog/how-to-wear-high-ankle-boots	January 2019

What to do:

• Use a canonical tag from page A to page B. As a reinforcement to Google, you could also use a self-referencing canonical tag on page B.
• After having assessed accessibility and internal link equity of both pages, you may want to change all/some internal links (coming from the site to page A) to page B if you deem it useful.

Pages re-optimisation

As already touched on, it primarily involves a metadata type of cannibalisation, which is what I named as type 1 in this article. After identifying the pages whose meta data seem to overlap or somehow target the same/highly similar keywords, you will need to decide which is your primary page for that keyword/keyword group and re-optimise the competing pages.

See the example earlier in the blog post to get a better idea.

Content consolidation

This type of solution involves consolidating a part or the entire content of a page into another. Once that has happened, it is down to you to decide if it is worth keeping the page you have stripped content from or just 301 redirect it to the other.

You would use consolidation as an option if you think the cannibalisation is a result of similar or duplicated content between multiple pages, which is more likely to be the type 2 of cannibalisation, as stated earlier. It is essential to establish your primary page first so you are able to act on the competing internal pages. Content consolidation requires you to move the offending content to your primary page in order to stop this problem and improve your rankings.

For example, you might have created a new article that falls under a certain content theme (in this instance, boots cleaning). You then realise that a paragraph of your new page B touches on leather boots and how to take care of them, which is something you have covered in page A. In case both articles respond to similar intents (one targeting cleaning leather only, the other targeting cleaning boots in general), then it is worth consolidating the offending content from page B to page A, and add an internal link to page A instead of the paragraph that covers leather boots in page B.

Page URL	Date of blog post
Page A: blog/how-to-clean-leather-boots	December 2017
Page B: /blog/boots-cleaning-guide-2019/	January 2019

What to do:

• Find the offending part of content on page B, review it and consolidate the most compelling bits to page A
• Replace the stripped content on page B with a direct internal link pointing to page A
• Often after having consolidated the content of a page to another, there is no scope for the page where content has been stripped from so it should just be redirected (301).

How can I avoid cannibalisation in the first place?

The best way to prevent cannibalisation from happening is a simple, yet underrated task, that involves keyword mapping. Implementing a correct mapping strategy for your site is a key part of your SEO, as important as your keyword research.

Carson Ward has written an awesome moz blog post about the topic, I recommend you have a look.

Don’t take 'intent' for granted

Another way to avoid cannibalisation, and the last tip I want to share with you, involves something most of you are familiar with: search intent.

Most of the time, we take things for granted, assuming Google will behave in a certain way and show certain type of results. What I mean by this is: When you work on your keyword mapping, don’t forget to check what kind of results search engines display before assuming a certain outcome. Often, even Google is not sure and will not always get intent right.

For instance, when searching for ‘shoes gift ideas’ and ‘gift ideas for shoe lovers’ I get two very different SERPs despite the fact that my intent is kind of the same: I am looking for ideas for a gift which involves shoes.

The SERP on the left shows a SERP for a query of "shoes gift ideas". It displays a row of pictures from Google Images with the link to see more, one editorial page (informational content), and then the rest of results are all transactional/e-commerce pages for me to buy from. Google has assumed that I’d like to see commercial pages as I might be close to a conversion.

The SERP on the right shows a SERP for a query of "gift ideas for show loves", displaying a row of Google Shopping ads and then a featured snippet, taken from an editorial page, while the rest are a mix of transactional and editorial pages, with Pinterest ranking twice in the top 10. Clearly Google is not sure what I would prefer to see here. Am I still in the consideration phase or am I moving to conversion?

The example above is just one of the many I encountered when going through my keyword research and mapping task. Before going after a certain keyword/keyword cluster, try and address all these points:

• Check if one of your existing pages has already covered it.
• If so, how well have you covered the keyword target? What can you do to improve my focus? Is there any cannibalisation that is holding you back?
• If you do not have a page for it, is it worth creating one and what implications will it have on your existing pages?
• Check what results Google is displaying for that keyword target, as it might be different from your expectations.
• Once you have created a new page/s, double check this has not created unintentional and unplanned cannibalisation further down the line by using the tips in this post.

Conclusion

Keyword cannibalisation is an underrated, but rather significant, problem, especially for sites that have been running for several years and end up having lots of pages. However, fear not — there are simple ways to monitor this issue and hopefully this post can help you speed up the whole process to find such instances.

Most of the times, it is just a matter of using the most logical approach while considering other SEO elements such as backlinks, crawlability, and content duplication. If possible, always test your changes first before applying it at site-wide level or making them permanent.

If you, like me, are a fan of knowledge sharing and you think there are better ways to help with cannibalisation, please comment below!

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Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape

Posted by KameronJenkins

When your target is constantly moving, how can you keep your clients informed and happy?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever struggled to keep up with all the changes in our industry.

Go ahead, don’t be shy!

Even the most vigilant SEOs have been caught off guard by an algorithm update, changes to the SERP layout, or improvements to the tools we rely on.

It can be tiring trying to keep up with a constantly moving target, but it doesn’t even stop there. SEOs must also explain those developments to their clients and stakeholders.

Work at an agency? Your clients will want to know that you’re helping them stay relevant. During my agency years, I can’t tell you how many times clients emailed in with a link to an article on the topic of a new development asking, “Do we need to be worried about this? How can we use this for our SEO?” Keeping apprised of these changes and informing your client how it applies to them is a critical component of not just campaign success, but customer loyalty.

Work in-house? The main difference here is that your client is your boss. Whereas at an agency you might lose a client over communication lapses, in-house SEOs could lose their jobs. That’s obviously the worst-case scenario, but if you’re in a budget-conscious, SEO-immature company, failing to stay relevant and communicate those changes effectively could mean your boss stops seeing the value in your position.

Anticipating changes and mitigating anxiety

There are some changes we know about ahead of time.

For example, when Google announced the mobile friendly update (remember #mobilegeddon?), they did so two months ahead of the actual rollout, and they had also been encouraging the use of mobile-friendly design long before that.

Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal back in 2014 and had been advocating for a secure web long before that, but they didn’t start adding the “not secure” warning to all non-HTTPS pages in Chrome until July 2018.

Big changes usually warrant big announcements ahead of the rollout. You need time to prepare for changes like this and to use that time to prepare your clients and stakeholders as well. It’s why Moz put so much effort into educational materials around the rollout of the new DA.

But in order to mitigate the anxiety these changes can cause, we have to know about them. So where can we go to stay up-to-date?

If you’ve been in the SEO industry for any length of time, these sources likely won’t be new to you, but they’re some of the best ways to keep yourself informed:

• The Google Webmaster Central Blog: Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index.
• The Keyword: Google’s main company blog — good for staying up-to-date with company news and product updates.
• Industry blogs like Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal or local-specific SEO blogs like Mike Blumenthal’s and LocalU (there are tons more).
• Paying attention to notices and updates from your SEO software/services providers.
• Experience! When you’re in the trenches every day, you’re bound to discover something new.

If you know a change like this is coming, be proactive! Inform your clients of what the change is, how it affects them, and what you plan on doing about it.

For example:

Hey [client]! One of the metrics that we include in your reporting, Domain Authority (DA), will be changing next month, so we wanted to let you know what you can expect! Moz is changing how they calculate DA, and as a result, some DA scores may be higher or lower. Rest assured, we’ll be monitoring your DA score to see how it changes in relation to your competitors’ scores. Here are some helpful slides for more information on the update, or feel free to call us and we’ll be happy to walk you through it in more detail.

When you’re able to proactively communicate changes, clients and stakeholders have less cause to worry. They can see that you’re on top of things, and that their campaign is in good hands.

What about the changes you didn’t see coming?

Plenty of changes happen without warning. What are SEOs supposed to do then?

To answer that question, I think we need to back it all the way up to your client’s first day with your agency (or for in-housers, your first few days on the job).

Even with unexpected changes, preventative measures can help SEOs react to these changes in a way that doesn’t compromise the stability of their client or stakeholder relationship.

What are those preventative measures?

• Give them a brief overview of how search works: Don’t venture too far into the weeds, but a basic overview of how crawling, indexing, and ranking work can help your clients understand the field they’re playing on.
• Explain the volatile nature of search engines: Google makes changes to their algorithm daily! Not all of those are major, and you don’t want to scare your client into thinking that you’re flying totally blind, but they should at least know that change is a normal part of search.
• Prepare them for unannounced changes: Let your client know that while there are some changes we can see coming, others roll out with no prior notice. This should prevent any upset caused by seeing changes they weren’t informed about.

By setting the stage with this information at the outset of your relationship, clients and stakeholders are more likely to trust that you’ve got a handle on things when changes do occur. Just make sure that you respond to unexpected changes the same way you would prepare your client for a planned change: tell them what the change was, how it affects them (if at all), and what you’re doing about it (if anything).

Your communication checklist

Whether you’re an SEO at an agency or in-house, you have a lot on your plate. Not only do you have to be a good SEO — you also serve as a sort of professional justifier. In other words, it’s not only about how well you did, but also how well you communicated what you did.

Like I said, it’s a lot. But hopefully I have something that can help.

I put together this list of tips you can use to guide your own client/stakeholder communication strategy. Every one of us is in a unique situation, so choose from the checklist accordingly, but my hope is that you can use this brain dump from my years in an agency and in-house to make the communication side of your job easier.

✓ Set the stage from the beginning

SEO can be a bumpy ride. Lay the foundation for your campaign by making sure your client understands the volatile nature of the industry and how you’ll respond to those changes. Doing so can foster trust and confidence, even amidst change.

✓ Never be defensive

Sometimes, clients will bring something to your attention before you’ve had a chance to see it, whether that be a traffic dip, a Google update, or otherwise. This can prompt a concerned “What’s going on?” or “Why didn’t I know about this?” Don’t try to spin this. Own up to the missed opportunity for communication and proceed to give the client the insight they need.

✓ Be proactive whenever possible

Aim to make missed communication opportunities the exception, not the rule. Being proactive means having your finger always on the pulse and intuitively knowing what needs to be shared with your client before they have to ask.

✓ Acknowledge unexpected changes quickly

If you encounter a change that you weren’t prepared for, let your client know right away — even if the news is negative. There’s always the temptation to avoid this in hopes your client never notices, but it’s much better to acknowledge it than look like you were hiding something or totally out of the loop. Acknowledge the change, explain why it happened, and let your client know what you’re doing about it.

✓ Always bring it back to the “so what?”

For the most part, your clients don’t have time to care about the finer points of SEO. When sharing these updates, don’t spend too long on the “what” before getting to the “how does this impact me?”

✓ Avoid jargon and simplify

SEO has a language all its own, but it’s best to keep that between SEOs and not let it bleed into our client communication. Simplify your language wherever possible. It can even be helpful to use illustrations from everyday life to drive your point home.

✓ Add reminders to reports

Communicate with your clients even when you’re not calling or emailing them! By adding explanations to your clients’ reports, you can assuage the fears that can often result from seeing fluctuations in the data.

✓ Keep updates actionable and relevant

Search changes constantly. That means there’s tons of news you could be sending to your client every day. Do you need to send it all? Not necessarily -- it’s best to keep updates relevant and actionable. Instead of “Hey there was an update [link to explainer post]” it’s much more relevant to say, “Hey, there was an update relevant to your industry and here’s what we’re planning on doing about it.”

✓ Put changes into perspective

As humans, it’s in our nature to make mountains out of molehills. As the SEO manager, you can prepare for these types of overreactions by always being ready to put a change into perspective (ex: “here’s how this does/doesn’t impact your leads and revenue”).

✓ Adapt your communication to your client’s preferences and the nature of the change

We all work with different types of clients and stakeholders. There are the “Can you call me?” clients, the “I have an idea” clients, the clients who never respond… you get the idea. The communication method that’s best for one client might not be well received by another. It’s also important to cater your communication method to the nature of the changes. Was there a big update? A phone call might be best. Small update? An email will probably suffice.

✓ Practice empathy

Above all else, let’s all strive to be more empathetic. Because we know SEO so well, it can be easier for us to take changes in stride, but think about your clients or your boss. SEO might as well be a black box to many business owners, so changes can be even scarier when you don’t know what’s going on and your business is at stake.

Putting it all into practice

If DA is one of your reporting metrics, or something your client/stakeholder pays attention to, then our March 5th update is the perfect opportunity to put all of this into practice.

We have a great DA 2.0 resource center for you so that you can prepare yourself, and those dependent on you, for the change.

Here’s what’s included:

• An explainer video
• A Q&A forum
• A slide deck
• A white paper

Russ Jones will also be hosting an entire webinar on this topic to help you understand these changes so you can speak intelligently about them to your clients and stakeholders. Join him on Thursday, February 21 at 10am PDT:

Save my spot!

Communicating with clients and stakeholders is a bit of an art form, but with empathy and preparedness, we can tackle any change that’s thrown our way.

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Using STAT for Content Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Search results are sophisticated enough to show searchers not only the content they want, but in the format they want it. Being able to identify searcher intent and interest based off of ranking results can be a powerful driver of content strategy. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we warmly welcome Dana DiTomaso as she describes her preferred tools and methods for developing a modern and effective content strategy.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and partner of Kick Point, which is a digital marketing agency based way up in Edmonton, Alberta. Come visit sometime.

What I'm going to be talking about today is using STAT for content strategy. STAT, if you're not familiar with STAT Search Analytics, which is in my opinion the best ranking tool on the market and Moz is not paying me to say that, although they did pay for STAT, so now STAT is part of the Moz family of products. I really like STAT. I've been using it for quite some time. They are also Canadian. That may or may not influence my decision.

But one of the things that STAT does really well is it doesn't just show you where you're ranking, but it breaks down what type of rankings and where you should be thinking about rankings. Typically I find, especially if you've been working in this field for a long time, you might think about rankings and you still have in your mind the 10 blue links that we used to have forever ago, and that's so long gone. One of the things that's useful about using STAT rankings is you can figure out stuff that you should be pursuing other than, say, the written word, and I think that that's something really important again for marketers because a lot of us really enjoy reading stuff.

Consider all the ways searchers like to consume content

Maybe you're watching this video. Maybe you're reading the transcript. You might refer to the transcript later. A lot of us are readers. Not a lot of us are necessarily visual people, so sometimes we can forget stuff like video is really popular, or people really do prefer those places packs or whatever it might be. Thinking outside of yourself and thinking about how Google has decided to set up the search results can help you drive better content to your clients' and your own websites.

The biggest thing that I find that comes of this is you're really thinking about your audience a lot more because you do have to trust that Google maybe knows what it's doing when it presents certain types of results to people. It knows the intent of the keyword, and therefore it's presenting results that make sense for that intent. We can argue all day about whether or not answer boxes are awesome or terrible.

But from a visitor's perspective and a searcher's perspective, they like them. I think we need to just make sure that we're understanding where they might be showing up, and if we're playing by Google rules, people also ask is not necessarily going anywhere.

All that being said, how can we use ranking results to figure out our content strategy? The first thing about STAT, if you haven't used STAT before, again check it out, it's awesome.

Grouping keywords with Data Views

But one of the things that's really nice is you can do this thing called data views. In data views, you can group together parts of keywords. So you can do something called smart tags and say, "I want to tag everything that has a specific location name together."

Opportunities — where are you not showing up?

Let's say, for example, that you're working with a moving company and they are across Canada. So what I want to see here for opportunities are things like where I'm not ranking, where are there places box showing up that I am not in, or where are the people also ask showing up that I am not involved in. This is a nice way to keep an eye on your competitors.

Locations

Then we'll also do locations. So we'll say everything in Vancouver, group this together. Everything in Winnipeg, group this together. Everything in Edmonton and Calgary and Toronto, group all that stuff together.

Attributes (best, good, top, free, etc.)

Then the third thing can be attributes. This is stuff like best, good, top, free, cheap, all those different things that people use to describe your product, because those are definitely intent keywords, and often they will drive very different types of results than things you might consider as your head phrases.

So, for example, looking at "movers in Calgary" will drive a very different result than "top movers in Calgary." In that case, you might get say a Yelp top 10 list. Or if you're looking for "cheapest mover in Calgary,"again a different type of search result. So by grouping your keywords together by attributes, that can really help you as well determine how those types of keywords can be influenced by the type of search results that Google is putting out there.

Products / services

Then the last thing is products/services. So we'll take each product and service and group it together. One of the nice things about STAT is you can do something called smart tags. So we can, say, figure out every keyword that has the word "best" in it and put it together. Then if we ever add more keywords later, that also have the word "best,"they automatically go into that keyword group. It's really useful, especially if you are adding lots of keywords over time. I recommend starting by setting up some views that make sense.

You can just import everything your client is ranking for, and you can just take a look at the view of all these different keywords. But the problem is that there's so much data, when you're looking at that big set of keywords, that a lot of the useful stuff can really get lost in the noise. By segmenting it down to a really small level, you can start to understand that search for that specific type of term and how you fit in versus your competition.

A deep dive into SERP features

So put that stuff into STAT, give it a little while, let it collect some data, and then you get into the good stuff, which is the SERP features. I'm covering just a tiny little bit of what STAT does. Again, they didn't pay me for this. But there's lots of other stuff that goes on in here. My personal favorite part is the SERP features.

Which features are increasing/decreasing both overall and for you?

So what I like here is that in SERP features it will tell you which features are increasing and decreasing overall and then what features are increasing and decreasing for you.

This is actually from a real set for one of our clients. For them, what they're seeing are big increases in places version 3, which is the three pack of places. Twitter box is increasing. I did not see that coming. Then AMP is increasing. So that says to me, okay, so I need to make sure that I'm thinking about places, and maybe this is a client who doesn't necessarily have a lot of local offices.

Maybe it's not someone you would think of as a local client. So why are there a lot more local properties popping up? Then you can dive in and say, "Okay, only show me the keywords that have places boxes." Then you can look at that and decide: Is it something where we haven't thought about local SEO before, but it's something where searchers are thinking about local SEO? So Google is giving them three pack local boxes, and maybe we should start thinking about can we rank in that box, or is that something we care about.

Again, not necessarily content strategy, but certainly your SEO strategy. The next thing is Twitter box, and this is something where you think Twitter is dead. No one is using Twitter. It's full of terrible people, and they tweet about politics all day. I never want to use it again, except maybe Google really wants to show more Twitter boxes. So again, looking at it and saying, "Is Twitter something where we need to start thinking about it from a content perspective? Do we need to start focusing our energies on Twitter?"

Maybe you abandoned it and now it's back. You have to start thinking, "Does this matter for the keywords?" Then AMP. So this is something where AMP is really tricky obviously. There have been studies where it said, "I implemented AMP, and I lost 70% of my traffic and everything was terrible." But if that's the case, why would we necessarily be seeing more AMP show up in search results if it isn't actually something that people find useful, particularly on mobile search?

Desktop vs mobile

One of the things actually that I didn't mention in the tagging is definitely look at desktop versus mobile, because you are going to see really different feature sets between desktop and mobile for these different types of keywords. Mobile may have a completely different intent for a type of search. If you're a restaurant, for example, people looking for reservations on a desktop might have different intent from I want a restaurant right now on mobile, for example, and you're standing next to it and maybe you're lost.

What kind of intent is behind the search results?

You really have to think about what that intent means for the type of search results that Google is going to present. So for AMP, then you have to look at it and say, "Well, is this newsworthy? Why is more AMP being shown?" Should we consider moving our news or blog or whatever you happen call it into AMP so that we can start to show up for these search results in mobile? Is that a thing that Google is presenting now?

We can get mad about AMP all day, but how about instead if we actually be there? I don't want the comment section to turn into a whole AMP discussion, but I know there are obviously problems with AMP. But if it's being shown in the search results that searchers who should be finding you are seeing and you're not there, that's definitely something you need to think about for your content strategy and thinking, "Is AMP something that we need to pursue? Do we have to have more newsy content versus evergreen content?"

Build your content strategy around what searchers are looking for

Maybe your content strategy is really focused on posts that could be relevant for years, when in reality your searchers are looking for stuff that's relevant for them right now. So for example, things with movers, there's some sort of mover scandal. There's always a mover who ended up taking someone's stuff and locking it up forever, and they never gave it back to them. There's always a story like that in the news.

Maybe that's why it's AMP. Definitely investigate before you start to say, "AMP everything." Maybe it was just like a really bad day for movers, for example. Then you can see the decreases. So the decrease here is organic, which is that traditional 10 blue links. So obviously this new stuff that's coming in, like AMP, like Twitter, like places is displacing a lot of the organic results that used to be there before.

So instead you think, well, I can do organic all day, but if the results just aren't there, then I could be limiting the amount of traffic I could be getting to my website. Videos, for example, now it was really interesting for this particular client that videos is a decreasing SERP for them, because videos is actually a big part of their content strategy. So if we see that videos are decreasing, then we can take a step back and say, "Is it decreasing in the keywords that we care about? Why is it decreasing? Do we think this is a test or a longer-term trend?"

Historical data

What's nice about STAT is you can say "I want to see results for the last 7 days, 30 days, or 60 days." Once you get a year of data in there, you can look at the whole year and look at that trend and see is it something where we have to maybe rethink our video strategy? Maybe people don't like video for these phrases. Again, you could say, "But people do like video for these phrases." But Google, again, has access to more data than you do.

If Google has decided that for these search phrases video is not a thing they want to show anymore, then maybe people don't care about video the way that you thought they did. Sorry. So that could be something where you're thinking, well, maybe we need to change the type of content we create. Then the last one is carousel that showed up for this particular client. Carousel, there are ones where they show lots of different results.

I'm glad that's dropping because that actually kind of sucks. It's really hard to show up well there. So I think that's something to think about in the carousel as well. Maybe we're pleased that that's going away and then we don't have to fight it as much anymore. Then what you can see in the bottom half are what we call share of voice.

Share of voice

Share of voice is calculated based on your ranking and all of your competitors' ranking and the number of clicks that you're expected to get based on your ranking position.

So the number 1 position obviously gets more ranks than the number 100 position. So the share of voice is a percentage calculated based on how many of these types of items, types of SERP features that you own versus your competitors as well as your position in these SERP features. So what I'm looking at here is share of voice and looking at organic, places, answers, and people also ask, for example.

So what STAT will show you is the percentage of organic, and it's still, for this client — and obviously this is not an accurate chart, but this is vaguely accurate to what I saw in STAT — organic is still a big, beefy part of this client's search results. So let's not panic that it's decreasing. This is really where this context can come in. But then you can think, all right, so we know that we are doing "eeh" on organic.

Is it something where we think that we can gain more? So the green shows you your percentage that you own of this, and then the black is everyone else. Thinking realistically, you obviously cannot own 100% of all the search results all the time because Google wouldn't allow that. So instead thinking, what's a realistic thing? Are we topping out at the point now where we're going to have diminishing returns if we keep pushing on this?

Identify whether your content efforts support what you're seeing in STAT

Are we happy with how we're doing here? Maybe we need to turn our attention to something else, like answers for example. This particular client does really well on places. They own a lot of it. So for places, it's maintain, watch, don't worry about it that much anymore. Then that can drop off when we're thinking about content. We don't necessarily need to keep writing blog post for things that are going to help us to rank in the places pack because it's not something that's going to influence that ranking any further.

We're already doing really well. But instead we can look at answers and people also ask, which for this particular client they're not doing that well. It is something that's there, and it is something that it may not be one of the top increases, but it's certainly an increase for this particular client. So what we're looking at is saying, "Well, you have all these great blog posts, but they're not really written with people also ask or answers in mind. So how about we go back and rewrite the stuff so that we can get more of these answer boxes?"

That can be the foundation of that content strategy. When you put your keywords into STAT and look at your specific keyword set, really look at the SERP features and determine what does this mean for me and the type of content I need to create, whether it's more images for example. Some clients, when you're looking at e-commerce sites, some of the results are really image heavy, or they can be product shopping or whatever it might be.

There are really specific different features, and I've only shown a tiny subset. STAT captures all of the different types of SERP features. So you can definitely look at anything if it's specific to your industry. If it's a feature, they've got it in here. So definitely take a look and see where are these opportunities. Remember, you can't have a 100% share of voice because other people are just going to show up there.

You just want to make sure that you're better than everybody else. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Exploring Google's New Carousel Featured Snippet

Posted by TheMozTeam

Google let it be known earlier this year that snippets were a-changin’. And true to their word, we’ve seen them make two major updates to the feature — all in an attempt to answer more of your questions.

We first took you on a deep dive of double featured snippets, and now we’re taking you for a ride on the carousel snippet. We’ll explore how it behaves in the wild and which of its snippets you can win.

For your safety, please remain seated and keep your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the vehicle at all times!

What a carousel snippet is an how it works

This particular snippet holds the answers to many different questions and, as the name suggests, employs carousel-like behaviour in order to surface them all.

When you click one of the “IQ-bubbles” that run along the bottom of the snippet, JavaScript takes over and replaces the initial “parent” snippet with one that answers a brand new query. This query is a combination of your original search term and the text of the IQ-bubble.

So, if you searched [savings account rates] and clicked the “capital one” IQ-bubble, you’d be looking at a snippet for “savings account rates capital one.” That said, 72.06 percent of the time, natural language processing will step in here and produce something more sensible, like “capital one savings account rates.”

On the new snippet, the IQ-bubbles sit at the top, making room for the “Search for” link at the bottom. The link is the bubble snippet’s query and, when clicked, becomes the search query of a whole new SERP — a bit of fun borrowed from the “People also ask” box.

You can blame the ludicrous “IQ-bubble” name on Google — it’s the class tag they gave on HTML SERP. We have heard them referred to as “refinement” bubbles or “related search” bubbles, but we don’t like either because we’ve seen them do both refine and relate. IQ-bubble it is.

There are now 6 times the number of snippets on a SERP

Back in April, we sifted through every SERP in STAT to see just how large the initial carousel rollout was. Turns out, it made a decent-sized first impression.

Appearing only in America, we discovered 40,977 desktop and mobile SERPs with carousel snippets, which makes up a hair over 9 percent of the US-en market. When we peeked again at the beginning of August, carousel snippets had grown by half but still had yet to reach non-US markets.

Since one IQ-bubble equals one snippet, we deemed it essential to count every single bubble we saw. All told, there were a dizzying 224,508 IQ-bubbles on our SERPs. This means that 41,000 keywords managed to produce over 220,000 extra featured snippets. We’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor.

The lowest and most common number of bubbles we saw on a carousel snippet was three, and the highest was 10. The average number of bubbles per carousel snippet was 5.48 — an IQ of five if you round to the nearest whole bubble (they’re not that smart).

Depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty kind of person, this either makes for a lot of opportunity or a lot of competition, right at the top of the SERP.

Most bubble-snippet URLs are nowhere else on the SERP

When we’ve looked at “normal” snippets in the past, we’ve always been able to find the organic results that they’ve been sourced from. This wasn’t the case with carousel snippets — we could only find 10.76 percent of IQ-bubble URLs on the 100-result SERP. This left 89.24 percent unaccounted for, which is a metric heck-tonne of new results to contend with.

Concerned about the potential competitor implications of this, we decided to take a gander at ownership at the domain level.

Turns out things weren’t so bad. 63.05 percent of bubble snippets had come from sites that were already competing on the SERP — Google was just serving more varied content from them. It does mean, though, that there was a brand new competitor jumping onto the SERP 36.95 percent of the time. Which isn’t great.

Just remember: these new pages or competitors aren’t there to answer the original search query. Sometimes you’ll be able to expand your content in order to tackle those new topics and snag a bubble snippet, and sometimes they’ll be beyond your reach.

So, when IQ-bubble snippets do bother to source from the same SERP, what ranks do they prefer? Here we saw another big departure from what we’re used to.

Normally, 97.88 percent of snippets source from the first page, and 29.90 percent typically pull from rank three alone. With bubble snippets, only 36.58 percent of their URLs came from the top 10 ranks. And while the most popular rank position that bubble snippets pulled from was on the first page (also rank three), just under five percent of them did this.

We could apply the always helpful “just rank higher” rule here, but there appears to be plenty of exceptions to it. A top 10 spot just isn’t as essential to landing a bubble snippet as it is for a regular snippet.

We think this is due to relevancy: Because bubble snippet queries only relate to the original search term — they’re not attempting to answer it directly — it makes sense that their organic URLs wouldn’t rank particularly high on the SERP.

Multi-answer ownership is possible

Next we asked ourselves, can you own more than one answer on a carousel snippet? And the answer was a resounding: you most definitely can.

First we discovered that you can own both the parent snippet and a bubble snippet. We saw this occur on 16.71 percent of our carousel snippets.

Then we found that owning multiple bubbles is also a thing that can happen. Just over half (57.37 percent) of our carousel snippets had two or more IQ-bubbles that sourced from the same domain. And as many as 2.62 percent had a domain that owned every bubble present — and most of those were 10-bubble snippets!

Folks, it’s even possible for a single URL to own more than one IQ-bubble snippet, and it’s less rare than we’d have thought — 4.74 percent of bubble snippets in a carousel share a URL with a neighboring bubble.

This begs the same obvious question that finding two snippets on the SERP did: Is your content ready to pull multi-snippet duty?

"Search for" links don't tend to surface the same snippet on the new SERP

Since bubble snippets are technically providing answers to questions different from the original search term, we looked into what shows up when the bubble query is the keyword being searched.

Specifically, we wanted to see if, when we click the “Search for” link in a bubble snippet, the subsequent SERP 1) had a featured snippet and 2) had a featured snippet that matched the bubble snippet from whence it came.

To do this, we re-tracked our 40,977 SERPs and then tracked their 224,508 bubble “Search for” terms to ensure everything was happening at the same time.

The answers to our two pressing questions were thus:

1. Strange, but true, even though the bubble query was snippet-worthy on the first, related SERP, it wasn’t always snippet-worthy on its own SERP. 18.72 percent of “Search for” links didn’t produce a featured snippet on the new SERP.
2. Stranger still, 78.11 percent of the time, the bubble snippet and its snippet on the subsequent SERP weren’t a match — Google surfaced two different answers for the same question. In fact, the bubble URL only showed up in the top 20 results on the new SERP 31.68 percent of the time.

If we’re being honest, we’re not exactly sure what to make of all this. If you own the bubble snippet but not the snippet on the subsequent SERP, you’re clearly on Google’s radar for that keyword — but does that mean you’re next in line for full snippet status?

And if the roles are reversed, you own the snippet for the keyword outright but not when it’s in a bubble, is your snippet in jeopardy? Let us know what you think!

Paragraph and list formatting reign supreme (still!)

Last, and somewhat least, we took a look at the shape all these snippets were turning up in.

When it comes to the parent snippet, Heavens to Betsy if we weren’t surprised. For the first time ever, we saw an almost even split between paragraph and list formatting. Bubble snippets, on the other hand, went on to match the trend we’re used to seeing in regular ol’ snippets:

We also discovered that bubble snippets aren’t beholden to one type of formatting even in their carousel. 32.21 percent of our carousel snippets did return bubbles with one format, but 59.71 percent had two and 8.09 percent had all three. This tells us that it’s best to pick the most natural format for your content.

Get cracking with carousel snippet tracking

If you can’t wait to get your mittens on carousel snippets, we track them in STAT, so you’ll know every keyword they appear for and have every URL housed within.

If you’d like to learn more about SERP feature tracking and strategizing, say hello and request a demo!

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This article was originally published on the STAT blog on September 13, 2018.

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A New Domain Authority Is Coming Soon: What’s Changing, When, & Why

Posted by rjonesx.

Howdy Moz readers,

I'm Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist at Moz, and I am excited to announce a fantastic upgrade coming next month to one of the most important metrics Moz offers: Domain Authority.

Domain Authority has become the industry standard for measuring the strength of a domain relative to ranking. We recognize that stability plays an important role in making Domain Authority valuable to our customers, so we wanted to make sure that the new Domain Authority brought meaningful changes to the table.

Learn more about the new DA

What’s changing?

What follows is an account of some of the technical changes behind the new Domain Authority and why they matter.

The training set:

Historically, we’ve relied on training Domain Authority against an unmanipulated, large set of search results. In fact, this has been the standard methodology across our industry. But we have found a way to improve upon it fundamentally, from the ground up, makes Domain Authority more reliable. In particular, the new Domain Authority is better at understanding sites which don't rank for any keywords at all than it has in the past.

The training algorithm:

Rather than relying on a complex linear model, we’ve made the switch to a neural network. This offers several benefits including a much more nuanced model which can detect link manipulation.

The model factors:

We have greatly improved upon the ranking factors behind Domain Authority. In addition to looking at link counts, we’ve now been able to integrate our proprietary Spam Score and complex distributions of links based on quality and traffic, along with a bevy of other factors.

The backbone:

At the heart of Domain Authority is the industry's leading link index, our new Moz Link Explorer. With over 35 trillion links, our exceptional data turns the brilliant statistical work by Neil Martinsen-Burrell, Chas Williams, and so many more amazing Mozzers into a true industry leading standard.

What does this mean?

These fundamental improvements to Domain Authority will deliver a better, more trustworthy metric than ever before. We can remove spam, improve correlations, and, most importantly, update Domain Authority relative to all the changes that Google makes.

It means that you will see some changes to Domain Authority when the launch occurs. We staked the model to our existing Domain Authority which minimizes changes, but with all the improvements there will no doubt be some fluctuation in Domain Authority scores across the board.

What should we do?

Use DA as a relative metric, not an absolute one.

First, make sure that you use Domain Authority as a relative metric. Domain Authority is meaningless when it isn't compared to other sites. What matters isn't whether your site drops or increases — it's whether it drops or increases relative to your competitors. When we roll out the new Domain Authority, make sure you check your competitors' scores as well as your own, as they will likely fluctuate in a similar direction.

Know how to communicate changes with clients, colleagues, and stakeholders

Second, be prepared to communicate with your clients or webmasters about the changes and improvements to Domain Authority. While change is always disruptive, the new Domain Authority is better than ever and will allow them to make smarter decisions about search engine optimization strategies going forward.

Expect DA to keep pace with Google

Finally, expect that we will be continuing to improve Domain Authority. Just like Google makes hundreds of changes to their algorithm every year, we intend to make Domain Authority much more responsive to Google's changes. Even when Google makes fundamental algorithm updates like Penguin or Panda, you can feel confident that Moz's Domain Authority will be as relevant and useful as ever.

When is it happening?

We plan on rolling out the new Domain Authority on March 5th, 2019. We will have several more communications between now and then to help you and your clients best respond to the new Domain Authority, including a webinar on February 21st. We hope you’re as excited as we are and look forward to continuing to bring you the most reliable, cutting-edge metrics our industry has to offer.

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Be sure to check out the resources we’ve prepared to help you acclimate to the change, including an educational whitepaper and a presentation you can download to share with your clients, team, and stakeholders:

Explore more resources here

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How To Setup Metrics to Optimize Your Digital PR Team’s Press Coverage

Posted by acarlisle

Over the past six years, our team at Fractl has studied the art of mastering content marketing press coverage. Before moving into Agency Operations, I on-boarded and trained over a dozen new associates for our digital PR team within a year as the Media Relations Manager. Scaling a team of that size in a such a short period of time required hands-on training and a clear communication of goals and expectations within the role — but what metrics are indicative of success in digital PR?

As a data-driven content marketing agency, we turned to the numbers for something a little different than our usual data-heavy campaigns — we used our own historical data to analyze and optimize our digital PR team’s outreach.

This post aims to provide better insight in defining measurable variables as key performance indicators, or KPIs, for digital PR teams and understanding the implications and relationships of those KPIs. We’ll also go into the rationale for establishing baselines for these KPIs, which indicate the quality, efficiency, and efficacy of a team’s outreach efforts.

As a guide for defining success by analyzing your own metrics for your team (digital PR or otherwise), we'll provide the framework for the research design, which helped us establish a threshold for the single variable we identified to best measure our efforts and be the most significantly correlated with the KPIs indicative of success of a digital PR team.

Determining the key performance indicators for digital PR outreach

The influx of available data for marketers and PR professionals to measure the impact of their work allows us to stray away from vague metrics like “reach” and the even more vague goal of “more publicity.” Instead, we are able to focus on the metrics most indicative of what we’re actually trying to measure: the effect of digital PR efforts.

We all have our theories and educated guesses about which metrics are most important and how each are related, but without researching further, theories remain theories (or expert opinions, at best). Operational research allows businesses to use the scientific method as a way to provide managers and their teams with a quantitative basis for decision making. Operationalization is the process of strictly defining variables to turn nebulous concepts (in this case, the effort and success of your digital PR team) into variables that can be measured, empirically and quantitatively.

There is one indicator identified to best measure your effort into a campaign’s outreach. It is a precursor to all of the indicators below: the volume of pitch emails sent for each campaign.

Because all pitches are not created equal, the indicators below gauge which factors best define the success of outreach, such as the quality of outreach correspondence, the efficiency of time to secure press, the efficacy of the campaign, and media mentions secured. Each multi-faceted metric can be described by a variety of measurements, and all are encompassed by the independent variable of the volume of pitch emails sent for each campaign.

Some indicators may be better measured by using more than a single metric, so for the purposes of this post, here are the three metrics to illustrate each of these three KPIs to offer a more holistic picture of your team’s performance:

Pitch quality and efficacy

• Placement Rate: The percentage of placements (i.e., media mentions) secured per the number of total pitches sent.
• Interest Rate: The percentage of interested publisher replies to pitches per the number of total pitches sent.
• Decline Rate: The percentage of declining publisher replies to pitches per the number of total pitches sent.

Efficiency and capacity

• Total days of outreach: The number of business days between the first and last pitch sent for a campaign, which is the sum of the two metrics below.
• Days to first placement: The number of business days between the first pitch sent and first placement to be published for a campaign.
• Days to syndication: The number of business days between the first placement to be published and the last pitch to be sent for a campaign.

Placement quality and efficacy

• Total Links: The total number of backlinks from external linking domains of any attribution type (e.g. DoFollow, NoFollow) for a campaign’s landing page.
• Total DoFollow Links: The total number of DoFollow backlinks from external linking domains for a campaign’s landing page.
• Total Domain Authority of Links: The total domain authority of all backlinks from external linking domains of any attribution type (e.g. DoFollow, NoFollow,) for a campaign’s landing page.

Optimizing effort to yield the best KPIs

After identifying the metrics, we need to solve the next challenge: What are the relationships between your efforts and your KPIs? The practical application of these answers can help you establish a threshold or range for the input metric that is correlated with the highest KPIs. We’ll discuss that in a bit.

After identifying metrics to analyze, define the nature of their relationships to one another. Use a hypothesis test to verify an effect; in this case, we’re interested to find the relationship between pitch count and each of the metrics we defined above as being KPIs of successful outreach. This study hypothesizes that campaigns closed out in 70 pitches or less will have better KPIs than campaigns closed out with over 71 pitches.

Analyzing the relationship and determining significance of the data

Next, determine if the relationship is significant; when the relationship is stated as statistically significant, the relationship observed has a high likelihood of happening in the future. When it comes to claiming statistical significance, some may assume there must be a complex formula that only seasoned statisticians can calculate. In reality, determining statistical significance is done via a t-test, a simple statistical test that compares two samples to help us infer a correlation of the same relationships in future samples.

In this case, campaigns with pitch counts below 70 are one group and campaigns above 71 are a second group. The findings below define the percentage difference between the means of both groups (i.e., the campaigns from Q2 and Q3) to determine if lower pitch counts do have a desired effect for each metric; those that are asterisked are statistically significant, meaning there is a less than a 5 percent chance that the observed results are due to chance.

How our analysis can optimize your digital PR team's efforts

In practice, the relationships between these metrics help you establish a better standard of practice for your team’s outreach with realistic expectations and goals. Further, the correlation between the specified range of pitch counts and all other KPIs give you a reliable range of what values you can expect when it comes to the metrics for pitch quality, timelines, and campaign performance when adhering to the range of pitches.

The original theory — that a threshold for pitch counts exists when the relationship between pitch count and all other metrics of performance were compared — is confirmed by the data. The sample with lower pitch counts (less than 70) sees a positive relationship with the KPIs we want to decrease (e.g. decline rates, total days) and negative relationship with the KPIs we want to increase (e.g. placement rates, link counts). The sample with higher pitch counts (greater than 71) saw the inverse — a negative relationship with the KPIs we want to decrease and a positive relationship with the KPIs we want to increase. Essentially, when campaigns with less than 70 pitches sent were isolated, the numbers improved in nearly every metric.

When this analysis is applied to each of the 74 campaigns from Q3, you’ll see nearly consistent results, with the exception again being Total Domain Authority. Campaigns with up to 70 pitches are correlated with better KPIs when compared to campaigns with over 71 pitches.

Vague or unrealistic expectations and goals will sabotage the success of any team and any project. When it comes to the effort put into each campaign, having objective, optimized procedures allows your team to work smarter, not harder.

So, what does that baseline range look like, and how do you calculate it?

Establishing realistic baseline metrics

A simple question helps answer what the baseline should be in this instance: What was the average of each KPI of the campaigns with fewer than 70 pitches?

We gathered all 70 campaigns closed out of our digital PR team’s pipelines in the second and third quarters of 2018 with pitch counts below 70 and determined the average of each metric. Then, we calculated the standard deviation from the mean, which defines the spread of the data to establish a range for each KPI — and that became our baseline range.

Examining historical data is among the best methods for determining realistic baselines. By gathering a broad, sizeable sample (usually more than 30 is ideal) that represents the full scope of projects your team works on, you can determine the average for each metric and deviation from the average to establish a range.

These reliable ranges allow your digital PR team to understand the baselines they must strive for during active outreach when in compliance with the standard of practice for pitch counts established from our research. Further, these baseline ranges allow you to set more realistic goals for future performance by increasing each range by a realistic percentage.

Deviations from that range act as indicators of potential issues related to the quality, efficiency, or efficacy of their outreach, with each of the metrics implying what specifically may be array. We offer context into each of those metrics defining our three KPIs in terms of their implications and limitations.

Understanding how each metric can influence the productivity of your team

Pitch quality and efficacy

The purpose of a pitch is to tell a compelling and succinct story of why the campaign you’re pitching is newsworthy and fits the beat of the individual writer you’re pitching. Help your team succeed by enforcing tried and true best practices to enable them to craft each pitch with personalization and compelling narratives at the top of mind. The placements act as a conversion rate to measure the efficacy of your team’s outreach while interests and declines act as a combined response rate to measure the quality of outreach.

To help your team avoid the “spray and pray” mentality of blasting out as many pitches as possible and hoping one will yield a media mention, which ultimately jeopardizes publisher relationships and are an inefficient use of time, focus on the rates our teams secure responses and placements from publishers in relation to the total volume of pitches sent. Prioritize this interpretation of the data rather than just the individual counts to help add context to the pitch count.

Campaigns with a high-ratio of interest and placements to pitches from publishers imply the quality of the pitch was sufficient, meaning it encompassed one or more of the factors known to be important in securing press coverage. This includes, but is not limited to, compelling and newsworthy narratives, personalized details, and/or relevancy to the writer. In some cases, campaigns may have a low-ratio of interest but high-ratio of placements as a result of a nonresponse bias — the occurrence where publishers will not respond to a pitch but will still cover the campaign in a future article, yielding a placement. These “ghost posts” can skew interest rates, illustrating why three metrics compose this KPI.

Campaigns with a high-ratio of declines to pitches imply the quality of the pitch may be subpar, which signals to the associate to re-evaluate their outreach strategy. Again, the inverse may not always be true, as campaigns with a low ratio of declines may be a result of non-response bias. In this case, if publishers do not respond at all, we can either infer they did not open the email or they opened the email and were not interested, therefore declining by default.

While confounding variables (such as the quality of the content itself, not just the quality of the pitch) may skew these metrics in either direction and remain the greatest limitation, holistically, these three metrics offer actionable insights during active outreach.

Efficiency and capacity

Similarly, ranges for timeline metrics can give your associates context of when they should be achieving milestones (i.e., the first placement) as well as the total length of outreach. Deviating beyond the standard timeline to secure the first placement often indicates the outreach strategy needs re-evaluating, while extending beyond the range for total days of outreach indicates a campaign should be closed out soon.

Efficiency metrics help beyond advising the strategy for outreach, informing operations from a capacity standpoint. Toggling between tens and sometimes hundreds of active campaigns at any given point relies on consistency for capacity — reducing variance between the volume of campaigns entering production to campaigns being closed out of the pipeline by staggering campaigns based on their average duration. This allows for more robust planning and reliable forecasting.

Awareness of the baselines for time to secure press enables you and your team to not just plan strategies and capacities, but also the content of your campaigns. You can ensure timely content by allowing for sufficient time for outreach when ideating your campaigns so the content does not become stale or outdated.

The biggest limitation of these metrics is a looming external variable often beyond our control — the editorial calendars and agendas of the publishers. Publishers have their own deadlines and priorities to fill, so we can not always plan for delays in publishing dates or worse yet, scrapping coverage altogether.

Placement quality and efficacy

Ultimately, your efforts are intended to yield placements to gain brand awareness and voice, as well as build a diverse link portfolio; the latter is arguably easier to quantify. Total external links pointing to the campaign’s landing page or client homepage along with the total Domain Authority of those links allow you to track both the quantity and quality of links.

Higher link counts built from your placements allow you to infer the syndication networks of the placements your outreach secured, while higher total Domain Authority measures the relative value of those linking domains to measure quality. Along with further specifying the types of links (specifically Dofollow links, arguably the most valuable link type), these metrics have the potential to forecast the impact of the campaign on the website’s own overall authority.

Replicating our analysis to optimize your team’s press coverage

Often times, historical research designs such as this one can have limitations in their cause and effect implications. This collection of data offers valuable insight into correlations to help us infer patterns and trends.

Our analysis utilized historical data representative of our entire agency in terms of scope of clients, campaign types, and associates, strengthening internal validity. So while the specific baseline metrics are tailored to our team, the framework we offer for establishing those baselines is transferable to any team.

Apply these methods with your digital PR team to help define KPIs, establish baselines, and test your own theories:

• Track the ten metrics that compose the KPIs of digital PR outreach for each campaign or initiative to keep a running historical record.
• Determine the average spread via the mean and standard deviation for each metric from a sizeable, representative sample of campaigns to establish your team’s baseline metrics.
• Test any theories of trends in your team’s effort (i.e., pitch counts) in relation to KPIs with a simple hypothesis test to optimize your team and resources.

How does your team approach defining the most important metrics and establishing baseline ranges? How do you approach optimizing those efforts to yield the best press coverage? Uncovering these answers will help your team synergize more effectively and establish productive foundations for future outreach efforts.

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All About Website Page Speed: Issues, Resources, Metrics, and How to Improve

Posted by BritneyMuller

Page speed is an important consideration for your SEO work, but it's a complex subject that tends to be very technical. What are the most crucial things to understand about your site's page speed, and how can you begin to improve? In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller goes over what you need to know to get started.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going over all things page speed and really getting to the bottom of why it's so important for you to be thinking about and working on as you do your work.

At the very fundamental level I'm going to briefly explain just how a web page is loaded. That way we can sort of wrap our heads around why all this matters.

How a webpage is loaded

A user goes to a browser, puts in your website, and there is a DNS request. This points at your domain name provider, so maybe GoDaddy, and this points to your server where your files are located, and this is where it gets interesting. So the DOM starts to load all of your HTML, your CSS, and your JavaScript. But very rarely does this one pull all of the needed scripts or needed code to render or load a web page.

Typically the DOM will need to request additional resources from your server to make everything happen, and this is where things start to really slow down your site. Having that sort of background knowledge I hope will help in us being able to triage some of these issues.

Issues that could be slowing down your site

What are some of the most common culprits?

1. First and foremost is images. Large images are the biggest culprit of slow loading web pages.
2. Hosting can cause issues.
3. Plugins, apps, and widgets, basically any third-party script as well can slow down load time.
4. Your theme and any large files beyond that can really slow things down as well.
5. Redirects, the number of hops needed to get to a web page will slow things down.
6. Then JavaScript, which we'll get into in a second.

But all of these things can be a culprit. So we're going to go over some resources, some of the metrics and what they mean, and then what are some of the ways that you can improve your page speed today.

Page speed tools and resources

The primary resources I have listed here are Google tools and Google suggested insights. I think what's really interesting about these is we get to see what their concerns are as far as page speed goes and really start to see the shift towards the user. We should be thinking about that anyway. But first and foremost, how is this affecting people that come to your site, and then secondly, how can we also get the dual benefit of Google perceiving it as higher quality?

We know that Google suggests a website to load anywhere between two to three seconds. The faster the better, obviously. But that's sort of where the range is. I also highly suggest you take a competitive view of that. Put your competitors into some of these tools and benchmark your speed goals against what's competitive in your industry. I think that's a cool way to kind of go into this.

Chrome User Experience Report

This is Chrome real user metrics. Unfortunately, it's only available for larger, popular websites, but you get some really good data out of it. It's housed on Big ML, so some basic SQL knowledge is needed.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse, one of my favorites, is available right in Chrome Dev Tools. If you are on a web page and you click Inspect Element and you open up Chrome Dev Tools, to the far right tab where it says Audit, you can run a Lighthouse report right in your browser.

What I love about it is it gives you very specific examples and fixes that you can do. A fun fact to know is it will automatically be on the simulated fast 3G, and notice they're focused on mobile users on 3G. I like to switch that to applied fast 3G, because it has Lighthouse do an actual run of that load. It takes a little bit longer, but it seems to be a little bit more accurate. Good to know.

Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights is really interesting. They've now incorporated Chrome User Experience Report. But if you're not one of those large sites, it's not even going to measure your actual page speed. It's going to look at how your site is configured and provide feedback according to that and score it. Just something good to be aware of. It still provides good value.

Test your mobile website speed and performance

I don't know what the title of this is. If you do, please comment down below. But it's located on testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com. This one is really cool because it tests the mobile speed of your site. If you scroll down, it directly ties it into ROI for your business or your website. We see Google leveraging real-world metrics, tying it back to what's the percentage of people you're losing because your site is this slow. It's a brilliant way to sort of get us all on board and fighting for some of these improvements.

Pingdom and GTmetrix are non-Google products or non-Google tools, but super helpful as well.

Site speed metrics

So what are some of the metrics?

First paint

We're going to go over first paint, which is basically just the first non-blank paint on a screen. It could be just the first pixel change. That initial change is first paint.

First contentful paint

First contentful paint is when the first content appears. This might be part of the nav or the search bar or whatever it might be. That's the first contentful paint.

First meaningful paint

First meaningful paint is when primary content is visible. When you sort of get that reaction of, "Oh, yeah, this is what I came to this page for," that's first meaningful paint.

Time to interactive

Time to interactive is when it's visually usable and engage-able. So we've all gone to a web page and it looks like it's done, but we can't quite use it yet. That's where this metric comes in. So when is it usable for the user? Again, notice how user-centric even these metrics are. Really, really neat.

DOM content loaded

The DOM content loaded, this is when the HTML is completely loaded and parsed. So some really good ones to keep an eye on and just to be aware of in general.

Ways to improve your page speed

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 can definitely speed things up. As to what extent, you have to sort of research that and test.

Preconnect, prefetch, preload

Preconnect, prefetch, and preload really interesting and important in speeding up a site. We see Google doing this on their SERPs. If you inspect an element, you can see Google prefetching some of the URLs so that it has it faster for you if you were to click on some of those results. You can similarly do this on your site. It helps to load and speed up that process.

Enable caching & use a content delivery network (CDN)

Caching is so, so important. Definitely do your research and make sure that's set up properly. Same with CDNs, so valuable in speeding up a site, but you want to make sure that your CDN is set up properly.

Compress images

The easiest and probably quickest way for you to speed up your site today is really just to compress those images. It's such an easy thing to do. There are all sorts of free tools available for you to compress them. Optimizilla is one. You can even use free tools on your computer, Save for Web, and compress properly.

Minify resources

You can also minify resources. So it's really good to be aware of what minification, bundling, and compression do so you can have some of these more technical conversations with developers or with anyone else working on the site.

So this is sort of a high-level overview of page speed. There's a ton more to cover, but I would love to hear your input and your questions and comments down below in the comment section.

I really appreciate you checking out this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I will see you all again soon. Thanks so much. See you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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